A probate judge in Alabama has made an unprecedented ruling that a six-week-old embryo has legal rights. The man pursuing the wrongful death lawsuit on behalf of “his deceased child” is suing the clinic at which his then girlfriend had an abortion and the pharmaceutical company that manufactured the abortifacient pill that she took there.

In 2016, Ryan Magers was 19 and unemployed, and his then girlfriend was 16 and a high school senior. According to the girl’s father, Magers pressured her into having sex. When she discovered she was pregnant, she let Magers know. He told her not to have an abortion. However, with the approval of her parents, she decided to have one. On February 10, 2017, six weeks into the pregnancy, she went to the Alabama Women’s Center, and took the abortifacient pill. Two years later, in January 2019, Magers, assisted by the anti-abortion organisation Personhood Alabama, filed his petition to serve as the representative of the estate of “his deceased child, BABY ROE”.

It is highly unlikely that Magers will succeed in his lawsuit. The current law in the United States is against him. In Conn v. Conn (1988), the Court of Appeals in Indiana reversed a lower court’s order granting a husband, Erin Andrew Conn, a temporary injunction against his wife, Jennifer Ann Conn, preventing her from having an abortion when she was six weeks pregnant. Appealing to the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Roe v Wade (1973), the appellate court ruled that “A married woman has an unconditional right to have an abortion in the first trimester” and “Erin has no right to veto Jennifer’s decision to obtain an abortion as such decision concerns only her.”

Nevertheless, the fact that Magers was able to get a judge to rule against a pregnant woman on behalf of a six-week old embryo is a sign of how far the anti-abortion movement in United States has come.

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"Even if Magers is right in thinking that the six-week-old embryo is as much his as his ex-girlfriend’s, the pregnancy is only hers"

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